good morning. i'm chris jansing. the breaking news couldn't come at a better time for president obama. the unemployment rate for september falling to 7.8%, the first time the jobless rate has been below 8% since january of '09 when president obama took office. now the big question is, will this change the narrative of the presidential campaign that was against the president after the debate? this morning we're seeing both campaigns end candidates energized, although for very different reasons. president obama was first trying to shake off his lackluster debate performance. mitt romney trying to capitalize on his new momentum. and he's got a new response to that video where he talked about the 47% going beyond what his line has been that he spoke inelegantly. >> well, clearly in a campaign

with hundreds, if not thousands of sechs and question and answer sessions, now and again you're going to say something that doesn't come out right. in this case i said something that's completely wrong. i absolutely believe, however, that my life has shown that i care about 100% and that's been demonstrated throughout my life and this whole campaign is about the 100%. when i become president, it will be about helping the 100%. >> i want to bring in carl bernstein, ledge answered investigative journalist and rana assistant editor to "time" magazine. does this change the narrative? >> perhaps. i think we need to look at who mitt romney is in this campaign. what he's tried to do is shed his manacles of the far right of the tea party fringe of the party which has come to control the republican party and escape it. the question is can he do it without being held accountable

for where he's been throughout this campaign. that's the real issue. two issue in this campaign. obviously president obama's conduct of his presidency and the republican party in washington. if romney can move to the center, as he's trying to do, and slip away from his past statements, perhaps he can have a new life here. i'm not sure he can get away with it because it involves a character transplant. >> did the president hand essentially a pass to mitt romney at the debate? because now he's able to come out after the debate. he's able to change what he said about the 47%, say i was completely wrong in making that statement and by the next debate it's going to seem like it's a little too old, now the new jobs numbers are out. was this a bigged missed snunt. >> well, i think the debate clearly romney won. but i think the jobs numbers really do work in the president's favor. they're going to be a strong thing for him to point to.

one of the arguments in the debate that romney used is we have to keep lowering taxes because growth is not on track. guess what? the unemployment number is ticking down. that blunts that argue am. i think the president has to come out strong with his arguments around investment and education and keep that momentum flowing. . >> let me give you some of the reaction that's been coming in. mitt romney's campaign issued a statement saying this is not what a real recovery looks like and he will create 12 million jobs. then this is what david plouffe had to say just a short time ago on chuck's show. >> i don't think we should focus on the politics today. this is obviously showing we continue to recover from a horrible recession. the recession wasn't an accident. there were policies and reasons that contributed to it. and, you know, reckless wall street behavior, tax cuts for the wealthy unpaid for. these are the same policies mitt romney wants to return to. >> so what does the president do with this? he's about to speak in virginia in the next hour. >> i don't tell the president

what to do. look, these numbers show some signs of hope. it's time for both campaigns to recognize what's real. we have huge structural unemployment in this country. it's going to last for years. the numbers are going to go down by a percentage point here and there. the voters deserve honesty about where we are. neither campaign has delivered it. yes, the recovery is coming along very slowly. is mitt romney going to create 12 million jobs out of the top of his hat like a magician? no. it's absolute nonsense. and this report shows a bit of movement. it reinforces what obama has said about slow progress, about the reality of our situation, but it's time to end this insane claim making about how one candidate or another is going to transform this economy. we heard romney the other night. he's got no transformational ideas except trickle down

economics which we've seen doesn't work. we're not going to have miracles here. we need steady leadership, and whoever can provide that and be honest with the american people about steady leadership in terms of recovery and how he is going to do it as president ought to be the president. but enough of this rhetoric. >> to your point that the truth is important after these jobs numbers came out, jack welch tweeted, unbelievable jobs numbers. these chicago guys will do anything. can't debate so change the numbers. they are saying, rana, that these numbers were manipulated. >> that's nonsense. come on. >> if they were manipulated he would have boosted the manufacturing numbers. they were still down. these were mostly gains in health and education. i'm hopeful actually that the ticking down of the unemployment figure will make it a little easier to come to the kind of grand bargain we're going to need to come to after the election. as carl said, whoever is president will have to lay out a

long, hard slog ahead and we need math that works. that means probably raising taxes or at least cutting some loopholes and making the tax code simpler, raising revenue, making some investments but maybe curbing entitlements. >> i want to bring in ralph nader, three-time presidential candidate and author of the new book called "the 17 solutions." always good to have you on the program. thanks for being here. mitt romney is painting himself as a defender of the middle class. he says he won't raise taxes on the middle class, won't cut education. has a plan to cover people with pre-existing conditions. is this the real mitt romney? give us your take on this economic debate. >> it's clearly the new fake romney on the debate and president obama couldn't adjust in time. he said what's this? and i think it's the old romney that counts. i think the 47% really reflected his plutocratic personality, and

he still has tattend to his bas, which is the primary base. that's what's going to bring him down. >> that's the political reality. there is a reality that there are people out there who want to know what these guys are going to do going forward. they're not economists. what is the conversation that's not being had, ralph, that you think needs to be heard? >> this is a corporate dominated economy. i mean, corporations decide where the capital is going to go, where it's going to be invested, who is going to be hired. general electric decides to export more jobs than they build in this country. they do. they decide not to pay taxes and get benefit back from the treasury. they do. and these presidents, they're held responsible for the whole economy even though they're not the czar. this isn't a command and controlled socialist economy, but none of them are willing to say, look, how about some corporate patriotism? how about corporations that were chartered and built on the backs of american workers here in the usa putting back more dividends

from their $2 trillion cash hoard? how about paying a decent minimum wage which would be $10.30 now if it was adjusted from 1968. you can't even get obama and romney to say, let's catch up with 1968 with a minimum wage for 30 million workers who are between $7.25 and $10.50. even though both of them believe in it. they're on the record saying, including romney for ten years, that they want an inflation adjusted minimum wage, but your profession won't ask those questions. >> ralph is right about the minimum wage, but in just going after across the board, quote, corporate, end quote, riding on the backs of workers, i think we have to look at the banks and separate the role of the banks from corporations. i think the banks in this country have gotten away with murder. i think obama has been fairly articulate about this, and they're holding back corporations in many ways in terms of their lending policies.

>> that's absolutely true. >> we need structural, corporate and banking reform. it's one of the things that came up in the debates the other night and again it's something that romney seemed to turn on a dime that was never there before. i don't know how he found that dime but all of a sudden he was for regulation. he's been against regulation. we now have a new issue in this campaign now that romney has tried to elude the bonds of the republican right and the people who control the party and have up until now, and that is the basic honesty and character of mitt romney. it might be that he can convince the american people that he is the centrist person who we saw on that stage the other night. but it is a new mitt romney. it didn't exist before in this campaign. it might have existed when he was running against ted kennedy for the senate in 1994 and then after he lost that race and started moving to the presidency, he's been moving

increasingly toward being controlled by the republican right message. he picked the vice presidential candidate who most embodies that message, and that is paul ryan, instead of picking portman, who would have sent a clear signal to the electorate that, oh, i'm george romney, i am this centrist candidate who wants to see a big tent republican party. let's see it for real. so far what we've seen is some talk on a debate in which he unquestionably faced a president of the united states who was not prepared for the debate or for the new mitt romney. >> well, we saw a new barack obama yesterday on the campaign trail. i'm guessing we're going to see -- >> not new, the same as he's been all along. he just happened to lose that persona. >> different than the debate. >> he lost the persona in the debate. now he seems to have gone back to it.

he does much better when he's out campaigning than he does in debates generally. that was the case previously. it seems to be the case now. he, too, needs to be more consistent in terms of how he looks to this electorate, and i presume we're going to see more of the campaigning obama than we saw in that debate, and at the same time he has got to tell a story here that sticks to numbers that are real. i think that if one party and one candidate can really stick to the real tale of where we are economically and how we move forward in this economy that is inhibited by what's happened in the great recession, that honesty might carry the campaign, but i don't think that pie in the sky is going to do it like we saw especially out of romney the other night. >> i agree with that, and i think it would actually play to the president's core message about investment.

the reason that we are where we are economically is a competitiveness issue. jobs have gone abroad. this is not a three-year process a ten-year process, it's a 30-year process. the labor share of the pie has been shrinking since the 1970s. so i think that that's good for the president because it plays to his message. we've got to invest in education in infrastructure. countries like china spent four times as much on infrastructure as a percentage of their economy. >> there's a big section in ralph's book about infrastructure and how you make the argument for that kind of investment. would you at least agree that on these kinds of issues, big government versus small government, there is a distinct choice and it's not that hard to figure out who is for what in this presidential campaign, ralph. >> they're not going deep enough. we really have to renovate and repair america. that's the biggest jobs program. the schools, the clin i cans, sewage, water systems, public transit systems. good jobs in every community that cannot be exported. how do you pay for this $2

trillion investment that the american society of civil engineers has outlined? you pay for it by cutting the bloated military budget. you pay for it by getting rid of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies handouts and bailouts and pay for it by returning the corporate tax system to the time of the prosperous '60s and you get out of afghanistan, stop being an empire, getting more political candidates on the debates, more voice for the voters. you know, give voters more choice. and this -- it's very interesting, 17 redirections for our country. most of them are supported by liberals and conservatives. there's a big -- >> why can't we get them done? >> because, because you have got an abstract ideological struggle in washington where two parties are also dialing for the same corporate dollars. look at msnbc. the deal that new jersey cut with msnbc to get it in new jersey for general electric

and -- >> and yet here we are in new york. >> listen to this. the deal was that the state employees -- the state tax that the msnbc pays in new jersey is reverted back to general electric and microsoft. >> to your point -- >> that's corporate welfare. >> these legal. nobody is suggesting these are illegal. let me finish with this question and we're way over time but is this going to change after the election? are we going to see a different washington that gets more done because this has been such an infective congress, really quickly. >> ralph has done a great job over the course of his life of showing americans issues that we ought to be looking at. at the same time i think what ralph is saying also does not pay proper attention to ways in which the two parties can address the problems that we have and we're going to see, i hope, some of that in the summer when the two parties come

together and look at the question of i believe that entitlements do have to be addressed, though not in the way that mitt romney says so. there are fiscal issues that go beyond mere tarring corporations that we need to look at specifics in washington and come up with a way of working together within the system and at the same time that brings new ideas to the table that are outside the usual ken of the two parties. >> the key gridlock now is veteran members of the house democrats, like john larson and others, have told me they're not going to recover the house in november. that means eric cantor and john boehner are going to stop anything that obama is going to try to do if he gets elected for a second term. that's the key focus. obama is not running with the congressional democrats. he didn't even mention them in his speech in charlotte. this is a politically selfish campaign because he knows he

can't get anything done unless the democrats -- >> i've got to let that -- i wish we could do the whole hour -- >> too simple, ralph. great ideas, but too simple. >> carl bernstein, rana, ralph nader, thanks for all of you. and we'll be right back 37. 7. . .

mitt romney isn't just reconsidering his comments about the 47%. he's also talking about the nation's top 1%. >> the rich in this country are actually doing better under president obama. the gap between the rich and the poor has gotten larger. the rich will probably do fine even if he's re-elected. >> joining me to talk about this ongoing fight over the 99% versus the 1%, digital editor at thompson reuters, krista freeland. it's good to see you. you wrote this fantastic article in the new yorker. i thought it was rifting. you talk about a group of

billionaires and how angry they are at president obama. in fact, they think they're being victimized by the president. givenl what we just heard from mitt romney, what is going on here? >> this is sort of the mystery that i tried to, you know, reveal, understand in my piece is the 1% and not even the 1%, sort of the 0.1%, the 0.01%, people who are even wealthier than mitt romney is, that group actually has not too badly. they have done better in their recovery than everybody else. you can call it a sort of super rich recovery. the 1% captured 93% of the income gain in 2009. >> 93%. and it's sort -- >> that's just the 1%. so the whole income gain that happened from 2009 to 2010, 93% of it went to the top 1%. >> so why are they so angry with the president that they're writing letters and -- i mean they're even -- one of them gave a book to the president for the

girls for sasha and malia and was like furious that he didn't get a thank you note. what is going on with this? >> one of my favorite examples of the extreme rich guy rage is one hedge fund manager sent out an e-mail to his friends, and the subject line was "battered wives." and it was sort of a mock sarcastic e-mail and the conceit behind it is that people on wall street who support president obama are as deluded as battered wives who stay with their husbands. >> in fact, let me quote from the article. >> as if he's beating them. >> let me quote from the article from this silicone valley entrepreneur who says, quote, take ton comparing barack obama's treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities, an approach he says, that the president as an african-american should be particularly sensitive to. and you also talk about leon cooperman whose letter to president obama went viral, and he went so far really as to compare barack obama to hitler?

>> well, how he puts it -- >> the third reich. >> that the conditions which led to the election of barack obama, who he portrays as uniquely unqualified to be president of the united states, are similar to the conditions which led to the rise of hitler in germany, a discontented populace, tough economic conditions, and so forth. but, you know, i think the way that i understand this mystery, that the people at the very top of america, who are doing phenomenally well. mitt romney is right, his class -- it's something that warren buffett -- i love the warren buffett likes to say. yes, there is a class war in america, and my class is winning, so that's true. so why are these guys who are winning so mad? i think there are a couple of reasons. the first is i think we tend to overlook how isolated they are from everybody else. they really just don't see. that amount of money means you

live, especially in this globalized economy, in a completely different universe, and, you know, in this sort of dress down age, in this very sort of culturally democratic age, i think we sometimes overlook really how big that gap is and, you know, occasionally when we come across it, we're all sort of startled. i think that's been a problem for mitt romney when he sort of mentions the things which are everyday in his life. i'll bet you $10,000 for this, of course i have an elevator in my house for my cars. suddenly we're all startled because we understand they live in a totally different world. i think the second thing, and i do think this is a key theme in the campaign, is for the past maybe 30 years, since reagan, the core idea in the american national narrative has been to be rich, to become rich, is not just good for you, it is a manifestation of collective virtue, right? the businessman has been the hero of the american story, and

i think a lot of that is true. capitalism is great, capitalism is far superior to the alternative, you know a centrally planned economy, but i think what we're starting to see, and you see this in some of the criticisms of bain, we're starting to say, wait a minute, what makes an individual person rich, what makes a guy on wall street pitrich doesn't necessar lead to the collective good. if you're a really rich guy, that's such a threatening statement. it's like, wait a minute, but i thought i was good. i thought i was virtuous, i thought i was the national hero. >> people can read about it "the new yorker." it's a terrific article. thank you so much for coming on. >> thank you very much. the nightmare continues for american airlines passengers. the loose seat problem the airline thought was fixed wasn't. at least 50 thursday flights were canceled, another 44 may be canceled today. american has now grounded 48 of its suspected 757s, although they believe they have the real problem under control that's

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the romney camp is looking to build on momentum from the debate by unleashing three new ads today. one of them focusing squarely on the battleground state of ohio. >> the question ohio families are asking is who can bring back the jobs? under president obama we've lost

over a half a million manufacturing jobs, and china has passed us in manufacturing. >> money, money, money being spent. boy, joining me is democratic strategist jamal sill mons, republican strategist joe watkins. good to see you guys. >> good to see you. >> good to see you, too. >> jamal, let me get your reaction. can these ads help? romney is losing ohio. the president has emphasized saving the auto industry, now the unemployment rate has gone down, but with a lot of cash can things be turned around? >> you know, at some point there's a declining significance of cash. in presidential campaigns people start paying a lot of attention to you. they pay a lot of attention especially though to their news anchor, 5:00 p.m. news anchor is the most trusted individual in most local markets. so that news show is very important. so that's why candidates go to town, they do those events, they try to make the morning and evening news so they can have an impression because people only believe half of what they see in tv ads. >> joe, what do you think? yesterday julian tep from the financial times was on and she was talking about $500 million

still that's left to spend on negative ads. do you think that that could have a big impact with the final 32 days of this campaign? >> well, i do. this is going to be a very, very tight race, as you can see. i think the numbers -- the next polling numbers that come out will show the race is tightening. there will be a real fight for the undecideds. part of the way you win the fight is you at the them what you're going to do but you also have to beat up the other guy. that's part of the sad reality of presidential politics. money is going to play an important factor coming up. >> i'm going to disagree with joe a little bit. i don't think there are that many undecideds and, second, i don't know that the numbers are going to move that much. i think the issues driving this campaign, the 47% remark by mitt romney, the medicare plan by paul ryan, those things haven't really changed very much and even some of the issues around reproductive rights that women are focused on, i'm not sure na anything has happened that's going to change yir opinion. >> let me ask you both about how

to spend that money. we know both campaigns have it. nbc campaign inbed garrett headache tweeted that top bundlers tell him the romney camp got lots of calls following the debate. they are pledging more money. at the same time the obama campaign raised a record $150 million in september. so let me give you the checkbook, joe. do you spend that kind of money on ads? do you beef up your ground game? what do you do with that cash? >> i think both. i think what ads allow you to do is they allow you to microtarget. tough target carefully the people who are not yet decided or the people who might at the last minute change their mind. and certainly some of the folks that might change their mind are people who are soft democrats but aren't working right now or who are displeased with the economy, with the direction in which the country is headed. so you want to spend that money to get to them to reach them with a positive message and to get them to be solid on your hand. >> jamal, are you worried about the debate? do you think the president has

more ground to make up and that might influence how they spend their money? >> the president certainly has ground to make up. it wasn't the greatest debate performance anyone has ever seen, and i think he's going to have to do better in the next debates. the thing we know about barack obama from every report, he's one of the most competitive people around, so i bet you the week after the next debate, we will not be having a conversation about how poorly he did but a conversation about how great he did. the bigger issue here, the republicans are going to have a tough chance because they don't really have an opportunity to spend more money on fields. you can't just dump enough money on the ground in the last month to try to turn on a field operation. that's something you have to build over weeks and months coming up to an election and there's no evidence that i have seen anywhere, i was down in tampa last weekend dealing with a lot of the obama troops, and there's no ground i have seen where republicans have really focused on the field operation. >> guys, great of you to come in on friday. have a great weekend. making news, janet napolitano is on her way to arizona after

the death of nicholas ivy. that's the border agent who was killed on tuesday. his funeral is set for monday. now federal investigators tell nbc news that based on evidence they found so far, they're looking at whether the shootings may have been a case of friendly fire. the turkish military is moving more tanks and troops to its border with syria following an exchange of artillery with syrian forces thursday which killed two women and three children inside turkey. the united nations is strongly condemning syria's actions. health officials in nearly two dozen states are crambling to notify their patients they may have been contaminated with deadly fungal meningitis. people may have been injected with those contaminated steroid shots. at least five people have died from the outbreak. coming up, it's been a wedge issue in elections past. this year how will the fight over abortion impact the race for the white house? richard lui will give us a look at where the candidates stand.

analysts today talking about apple. one year after the death of legendary co-founder steve jobs, and cbs's mandy drury is here with what's moving your money. so, i remember this a year ago. the question was, how will apple do without the vision of steve jobs? and i guess if you look at the stock price, the answer is not bad. >> absolutely. the numbers really do tell the full story here, chris. you know, you have, for example, on october the 5th 2011, about a year ago, $376.63 was what it cost you for one apple stock. now about a year later, october the 4th, 2012, $668.80 approximately. that's up about 77%, chris. you know, it's thanks to several products that obviously jobs helped to invent, things like ipods, iphone, ipad and they have helped to power stack in apple up to the record high just about a week or so ago we were above $700 for one apple stock.

so up nearly twofold this past year. apple has become, chris, the most valuable and most profitable company in the world. tim cook must be doing something right. >> speaking of companies that generate buzz, i was devastated to read on the front page of the "wall street journal" today, can i just read you the headline -- >> please do. >> "halloween horror story, the case of the missing pumpkin latte." say it isn't so. >> you know, it's a funny story basically. you know, there was this guy who headed to his local starbucks for a pumpkin spice latte. they were out of the special pumpkiny sauce that gives it that distinctive flavor. apparently there's been an unusual run on this pumpkin batch draining supplies at stores across the country, and some customers i believe have gone completely crazy and the desperation is such that some have even turned to a new instant version of the pumpkin latte. but stores are even running out of that powder stuff as well and prices are shoots up on the

secondary market. people really love that pumpkin spice latte. >> if you think this is a laughing matter, one man tweeted, my world almost ended this morning. so i rest my case. mandy drury, thank you so much. >> have a good weekend. >> you have a great weekend. to politics now where president obama is defending big bird on the campaign trail. >> but i just want to make sure i got this straight, he'll get rid of regulations on wall street, but he's going to crack down on sesame street. thank goodness somebody is finally cracking down on big bird. who knew that he was responsible for all these deficits. >> sesame street taking center stage after romney said he'd cut subsidies for pbs do urg that debate. pbs released a statement saying, quote, governor romney does not understand the value the american people place on public broadcasting. paul ryan is getting outraged by the man who wants his seat in congress. ron zer bin raised $770,000 in the third quarter. to be fair, ryan stopped

fund-raising when he accepted the nomination for vice president. he is still on the ballot and has 4 million bucks in the bank. and who would play the president in a movie. michelle obama told the website pop sugar either denzel washington or will smith, and then she joked, will has the ears which might give him the edge. come on. now, we usually talk about fast food as the root of our country's obesity problem. but it sounds like americans are cooking up some fattening foods at home. the daily meal is out with the most searched recipes for 2012. it's our list today. at five, bread. yes, people do still make it at home. chocolate chip cookies, chocolate cake. number two is meatballs. here is a surprising number one. the most searched recipe, pork chops. pork chops. [ male announcer ] eligible for medicare?

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researchers from the uk successfully gave the gift of hearing to deaf injury bills. using stem cells, scientists rebuilt tiny nerves in the inner ear of the gerbils. although gerbils are able to hear a range of sounds similar to humans, replicating the study in humans is still only a whisper. missouri senator claire mccaskill is getting a boost in the polls and in her campaign war chest. the mccaskill campaign says it raked in nearly $6 million last quarter. her republican challenger, todd akin, has been under fire over his, quote, legitimate rape comments. the controversy has spilled in the presidential race with democrats accusing mitt romney and the republicans of waging a war on women. richard lui continues our look at the candidates' stand on the issues. some new information on abortion today. >> that's right, chris. it may not be all about the

economy for one group. one in six registered voters say the candidate they vote for must share their view on abortion says gallup. it's one of the highest rates in 20 years. for supporters of abortion rights, 15% say here this they must agree with who they vote for. a larger portion of opponents of abortion rights, 21% there, say the very came. now, candidates know that this issue resonates, and it could be predictive. the public religion research institute found a majority of advocates of abortion rights favor president obama. now, opponents of abortion rights, they go with romney, 74%. now, the two candidates are diametrically opposed. romney would end funding to planned parenthood, he'd be against mandatory contraception coverage, and said he'd overturn roe v. wade, but at one point he wanted the opposite. >> i believe that since roe v. wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it.

>> i have supported the roe v. wade. i am pro-choice. my opponent is multiple choice. >> well, the president has consistently supported roe v. wade. he told a student town hall just that in 2004. >> it's not our position to impose on that woman something that has to do with her body. it's her body essentially that is at stake. >> the president has faced criticism. his plan to require religious employers to offer contraception came under fire, and before that in order to get the health care reform bill passed, he agreed to ban federal funds for abortion except in certain cases. now, to blunt the hangover, ads attacking romney aired, and one democratic group is now microtargeting over 338,000 women in the nine battleground states. women who support abortion rights but are obama defectors who may stay home or are

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in just moments we are expecting to hear from president obama in fairfax, virginia. there is the stage at george mason university center, and he's going to have a little something to crow about, unemployment below 8% for the first time since january 2009 when he took office. it was 7.8% last month with 114,000 jobs added. let me bring in national journal economic correspondent jim tankersley. good to see you. good morning. >> thanks for having me. >> you've written a piece out in the national journal today "the case against parasitic baby boomers," and i want to get to that but let me start with the jobs numbers. is this an indication we are turning the corner in the job market? >> well, i would be a little

hesitant to say we're turning the corner, but it certainly shows we're headed in the right direction. we have actual solid job growth of the last few months, still not enough to get, you know, 12 million people who need jobs and are looking for them back to bo work, but we're cutting in the unemployment rate for the right reasons. these are really good things. >> as the economists look at these numbers and say where should we have concern, where do we really need to try to boost these numbers, it would be manufacturing? >> manufacturing is the big concern here. i think it was a 16,000 job drop in the last month, and, again, month to month these things can be volatile, but you want that number to be better. it's been a strength of the recovery so far. it reflects partly what we have seen from factory orders and other big sort of shipment areas in the last few months, so if we're seeing a factory slow down, that would not be good for jobs overall. >> mitt romney frequently mentions the debt as the big threat to the economy and future economies. let me play a clip from wednesday's debate. >> i think it's, frankly, not

moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation, and they're going to be paying the interest and the principle all their lives, and the amount of dead we're adding at a trillion a year is simply not moral. >> which brings us to your provocative article in the national journal, generational warfare, the case against parasitic baby boomers. you start reading it and it says i love my father, there's a lovely picture of your father and you accuse him and all the other parasite his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every generation will pass a better country on to their children than the one they inherited. and then he kind of kicks your butt in the argument when you try to point out point by point. tell us why you wrote this article. >> well, first off, i'd like to point out i win at the end. secondly, he also wins because of the realization that is i make about my own generation. i wrote the article because it's a really important issue for

america, this idea, this long-held idea we've had, that every generation passes on a better life to the next, and it's stopped. the baby boomers have done three really egregious things in my mind and in the data. they have presided over an economy where economic opportunity has shrunk for the people who are coming along now. they have run up a huge national debt. that's both by voting themselves lower taxes and by voting more generous benefits with no plan to pay for them other than have their kids and grand kids pay for them, and killed the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and burned cheap fossil fuels. so i thought it needed to be written, and then i thought, well, we need to do it in a way that's fair to the baby boomers so i should put it as an argument and pick one of my baby boomers who happened to be by dad and we argued about it over the span of the week. >> this is a true conversation you had in the pacific northwest with your dad over a table. so he said back to you -- and he's a lawyer we should point

out. >> right. >> what was his best argument? >> i think he had a couple really good arguments, and did he. he put up a valiant fight on behalf of his generation and his best argument was they have done a lot of really good things. if you're a woman, if you're a minori minority, if you're someone with disabilities, you absolutely have much more opportunity now than you did when sort of the baby boomers inherited the economy and america. the second thing he pointed out was that my generation is not on track to do any better than his generation has done. that hits home very hard, and that's sort of how i end the piece, but the argue am where he tried really hard to deflect me was to say, well, it's not the boomers fault, it's congress, and that's where i feel like i really got him because the congress is right now the baby boomers. it was elected by baby boomers and it's filled with baby boomers, and they are right now mitt romney and barack obama i include in this kroo teak, are trying to figure out how to solve these problems on the backs of future jen rags not on the backs of the boomers.

>> i think if people read this they will be on team jim or team dad. i won't tell you where i am, but go dad. no. jim, it's great to see you. i recommend the article to people. it really is great. this wrapped up this hour of "jansing & co." thomas roberts is up next. good morning. good morning, everybody. the agenda next hour, we are expecting president obama to react to this stunning new jobs report showing the unemployment rate shopping to 7.8%. we are also going to hear live remarks from mitt romney on the campaign trail. both of the candidates facing off in virginia today. is this the real october surprise? these numbers. and there are already some accusations that the white house is cooking the books to win this presidential election. we break that down for you. and then battling for the vet vote. the son of vice president joe biden h beau biden will join me live. he will talk about his dad's big debate coming up next week. that and much more coming your

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another october surprise, this one a major victory for president obama. unemployment dipped below 8%. did the president just fulfill his biggest promise? is this still a one-term proposition for republicans? i'm thomas roberts. the agenda this hour, an unemployment report nobody seemed to expect but this reports puts the wind at the president's back today. both candidates speaking in virginia at this hour on the heels of a job report that shows unemployment at its lowest in years. 7.8% is the number for september, and that is the lowest monthly number since the president took office in january of '09. >> i don't think we should focus on the politics today. this is obviously showing we continue to recover from a horrible recession. >> politically -- >> what matters is that headline number with the seven handle as they say on the street. 7.8%, right? whatever the reason, the president can now say i've